This paper is an investigation of pedagogical tact in terms of vigilance. It is based on a close reading of a passage from Rousseau’s Emile: a (problematic and troubling) narrative account on the art of hosting a dinner party. Working with the narrative of the dinner party, distinctions are drawn between contrasting ways of knowing, and ways of being vigilant: surveillance and veillance sur. The paper explores the significance of this twofold vigilance for teaching and for the understanding of pedagogical (...) tact. (shrink)

Current educative practices have given rise to the predominant pressure to increase production and speed in academic work and education in general. Educators need to ask whether conceiving of education in such terms is what we really want our children and youth to experience. In this paper, we aim to interrogate the question of how a deceleration of education is possible, and why this would be desirable for students and teachers. We do this in a circuitous way, by exploring four (...) exercises in pedagogical deceleration. These exercises are inspired by philological, didactical, pedagogical, and phenomenological practices. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper invites us to reconsider our usual understanding of infancy, no longer as something that passes but as infantia. The Latin word infantia, which is not easy to translate, means a lack of speech, a lack of eloquence, and also infancy, babyhood, and dumbness. Drawing on Barbara Cassin’s works on the untranslatables, I propose to translate infantia, starting by not-understanding, and then by taking detours by different texts, in-between languages. Exercising translation allows us to expose ourselves to the (...) differences between languages. The exercise in translation that unfolds will help to challenge some familiar distinctions such as infant/adult and uneducated/educated. (shrink)